July 01, 2013.

Fellow map enthusiasts, the Atlas of Design needs your help! We’re looking for volunteer translators to help take our project to the next level, putting it squarely in front of a global audience.

The 2012 edition of the Atlas of Design, our bold little experiment, has been a great success. Our initial print run sold out quickly, and we brought it back for a second printing by popular demand. Now, as the remaining copies of the second printing sell out, we are starting to turn our attention toward 2014, when we begin the cycle again. Another edition, with all new maps representing the latest and greatest cartographic work from around the world. This time, we want more emphasis on that last part: the world.

We want to get the word out beyond the English-speaking world for the 2014 edition. We want more submissions from more countries, and we want to truly represent the global cartographic scene. But we need your help to do that. The Atlas is put together primarily by a small group of English-speaking volunteers based in the United States. We don’t have the language skills to reach out beyond the Anglosphere. If you’re fluent in both English and another language, we ask you to consider helping spread our message around the world.

We’re looking for volunteers who would be willing to put in some time over the course of several months doing the following:

It’s difficult to predict the amount of work needed, since we’ve never done this before. This is a fairly small operation, though, and we’re not expecting that this is going to require a massive effort from our translators. We are not, at this time, planning on translating the entire final book into another language. We will continue to publish in English.

We’ve had a great response from a number of volunteers already, and we’ve presently got people to cover Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Bengali, Chinese, Romanian, French, German, Finnish, Japanese, Portuguese, Ukrainian, and Russian.

If you’d be willing to put in some volunteer time, beginning late this year and continuing through the fall of 2014, we’d love to hear from you. Please contact us [email protected]!